She said: “This was despite Tony Hall, who was head of news at the time, claiming somewhat against the evidence that it was ‘basic policy’ that ‘there is an equivalence between all the Today presenters’.”

She added that one male colleague was given a large increase to prevent them leaving to a commercial station which was offering £300,000.

She said she eventually managed to negotiate a new deal which she was told put all three main presenters at the time within a “tiny percentage of each other”.

MacGregor added: “In my view, some of the BBC’s most precious assets in both radio and television lie elsewhere: They comprise its domestic and foreign correspondents, many of whom work fantastically long hours covering stories live on air with admirable clarity and skill often in difficult circumstances.”

Some 45 senior women (full list at the bottom of this story) at the BBC have signed an open letter urging director general Tony Hall to end sexist pay disparity at the corporation now – rather than by 2020 as he has promised.

The letter reads: “Compared to many women and men, we are very well compensated and fortunate.

“However, this is an age of equality and the BBC is an organisation that prides itself on its values.

“You have said that you will ‘sort’ the gender pay gap by 2020, but the BBC has known about the pay disparity for years.

“We all want to go on the record to call upon you to act now.”

It adds: “Beyond the list, there are so many other areas including production, engineering and support services, and global, regional and local media where a pay gap has languished for too long.

“This is an opportunity for those of us with strong and loud voices to use them on behalf of all, and for an organisation that had to be pushed into transparency to do the right thing.”

Those signing the letter include many who featured on last week’s list of BBC staff who earn more than £150,000, including:

The paper said that this is more than the number tuning in some nights to watch Gary Lineker present Match of the Day (salary £1.75m).

Women’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey told the paper that a group of female BBC employees “might consider speaking to an employment lawyer, anyone in our position would be thinking the same”.

Signatories of the list include sports presenter Claire Balding, paid £150,000-£200,000, for work on various sports including the Boat Race, Wimbledon and the Olympics. She earned the same amount as former Tennis Player John McEnroe who provides punditry for Wimbledon.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House how she discovered that presenting Radio 4 daytime programme Women’s House paid less than comparable shows.

She said: “I did a few jobs sitting in on different programmes. I did your job at BH, I did Saturday Live, on Radio 4 as well, I did Five Live Weekend Breakfast and Jenni Murray was having a hip replacement at the time and I did Woman’s Hour.

“Afterwards, and you know how these jobs are, you can’t really negotiate much about rates, I mean if you are lucky you might get a free coffee thrown in, but we are not talking about negotiating massive contracts and I was doing it myself, and the Women’s Hour was much – I mean 40 per cent – lower than the other programmes and I said to Jane (Garvey) afterwards ‘this is really odd’, because they wouldn’t budge on it.

“I said: ‘It is significantly lower than doing a weekend breakfast show on Five Live or Radio 4 or indeed BH’.

“I said to her: ‘I think there is a problem here, it is because only women have ever presented it’. It is the first time I thought: ‘Whoa, red flag’.”